The Mozilla Corporation today released Firefox 3 Beta 1, which is now available for download in a variety of languages. The beta includes updates to the default theme, the new places site management features, improved security architecture, and Gecko 1.9. Release notes with a more complete list of features, are also available.

If you haven't seen this blog entry, its worth reading. A great description (illustrated!) of why Firefox ends up hogging so much memory-- fairly bad heap fragmentation, and what they are now doing about it.

Great blog comments too, really nice to see dtrace and other analysis tools to benchmark and debug Mozilla. Plenty of useful solutions offered, and the blogger is currently testing OpenBSD's malloc with positive results.